Minecraft – Seeds and Psuedo-Random World Creation

The current version of Minecraft allows you to generate a new pseudo-random world whenever you want. You only need to give it a name, but for those that want to you can provide a “seed” for your world to generate from. Every world generate from a particular seed will be identical every time. Though your exact spawn point may not. This system has lead to many people sharing interesting seeds they have happened upon. Featuring interesting landscapes or dungeons near the spawn point – these can be sampled by anyone.

Seeds are used by the game engine as a start to a complex mathematical equation that procedurally generates your playable world. Every resource you find is pre-determined by this equation; though it’s location is only revealed when you discover it. One of the truly breath-taking features of Minecraft, the potential here is beyond the scope of today’s computers. Due to the way the world is created in blocks you will only reach the limits of this software by deliberately setting out to break it. Even this will require a lot of time on your part as travelling that far may take you several real-world days. Make sure you have a lot of free hard drive space if you decide to embark on such a project. My world is currently at 7MB and I basically haven’t explored the surface at all.

You can also play around with your world and its contents with a map editor. I have found MCEdit to be very useful for this. One extremely useful feature that this program has is the ability to change your spawn point. I suggest moving this in to your house to make things a little easier. You can also look around for interesting features but you will only be able to see what has already been generated. You will have to explore your world in game to expand your horizon.

Minecraft - a view from the seed Silly Name

A view from the seed "random"

If you would like to experience something in particular you can read through the huge lists of seeds here.

One particular highlight is 3666440496532277820 (how did they find this!):

Minecraft - Spawn inside a spider dungeon

3666440496532277820 - you spawn inside an underground spider dungeon

Another great resource is http://www.minecraftseeds.info/ This is a blog dedicated to interesting seeds for Minecraft. It provides features and pictures of highlighted seeds and allows you to report seeds that you have discovered too.

Some of my favourites are: